In the Days of Crimmins

Dingy storefronts, old bakeries maybe, laundries,
Girls in black, guys reading poems till three a.m.,
Coffee scalded, tastes like tin,
Listen, nod, reader’s girlfriend in the corner serious as church.....

They followed the code, how to be poets in Detroit, those days;
Code said, If you look intense as steel,
Then by Christ, you are intense as steel,
White-hot steel, cold rolled steel, Rouge plant steel,
Your words were tough, your balls were hard and righteous,
You were a poet and a man.
(Most of them were full of shit, bags of wind,
Sometimes a wildass lunatic if you were lucky,
Usually obscure, serious, fatal, & often when you got to know them,
Boring as a ton of dirt, & you drank that goddam coffee.)

Always a notebook, always notes, eternal notes, take lots of notes;
Write it down, you make it real.

Crimmins had a manuscript, the most amazing thing,
gonna bring everything together, Einstein atomic
theory jazz and chess, Euclid James Joyce Shakespeare
Blake Camus John of the Cross the Unities air earth
fire water, all with golden interstices, warp & woof,
architectonic of fugue cathedral sonnet sequence
algorithms masque, everything all in its place made
clear & manifest like fire, like sunrise, & a Great
Voice would say Behold.

(Crimmins looked a lot like Joyce himself, last year’s
gabardine, skinny hungry just a little nuts,
professors came to him for help, got only A’s, always
that manuscript in a cardboard box, bumming quarters
for a beer a pack of Chesterfields.

Traffic roared down streets in a city always cold
always nearly night, cars on Six Mile drove into
twilight & never came out again. Crimmins, all the
poets & apostles of Detroit, overcoats the color of
cement, rode shadow boulevards to poems & coffee,
jerking off till morning in front of naked ideas,
lurid theorems, lewd lascivious postulates of jagged
electroencephalogram, & those guys never came back
either.)

There were girls in cerebral night, who talked of Kafka,
Life is meaningless, cigarettes, sit for hours, the world’s all fucked up,
They were all in black, always black,
& every male poet there, conscious of righteous balls,
Wanted to get in bed with them, do it with someone
smart for once,
& damn, those girls must have gone to bed with someone,
But there was never, never one reported instance that
they had,
So maybe life was meaningless after all,
But who would know, we were only taking notes, taking notes.

Crimmins as far as anybody knew, & we watched him
night & day,
Never finished his masterpiece, manuscript’s still in
the box no doubt.
Never came together, all those things he’d weave into
miraculous
perfect unity, Mozart & calculus, blah blah blah,
So we hung around & itched in old wool suits,
Always waiting, taking notes, waiting still, the Great
Voice too,
Which even up till now will only utter Wait a little
longer,
So we wait, we wait for Crimmins, wait for shards to
form a mirror,
Finally see what the shattered world is like, & only
then
The Voice can say Behold.

Artist’s Statement

I n the Days of Crimmins marks a milestone time in my life, when I was in college and slowly beginning to grow up and become aware of such things as culture and the intellectual life. Of course, I thought of myself as a powerful intellectual and a deep poet, and I hung out with friends who thought of themselves the same way. It’s embarrassing to see myself then from the vantage point of many years, but it was a good phase to go through and an exciting time.

Misguided and absurd as many, or most, of my thoughts were then, it was the time when the potential adult in me was beginning to be born. A new world—however blurred at the time—was dawning. 

There really was a Crimmins, by the way, a raw genius who took twenty-five credits in math every semester and got A’s in all of them, to whom senior math professors would go for help with math.